Wojtek, there's no need for you to stand together with organizers of the protests to save Shaka Sankofa/Gary Graham, but please try hard not to stand to the right of the New York Times editorial.
At 9:04 PM -0400 6/19/00, Walter Lippmann wrote:
>Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2000 21:04:19 -0400
>From: Walter Lippmann <walterlx at earthlink.net>
>Reply-To: letters at nytimes.com
>Subject: [BRC-NEWS] Death Penalty Troubles in Texas
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>X-Sender: Walter Lippmann <walterlx at earthlink.net>
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>
>http://www.nytimes.com/yr/mo/day/editorial/19mon2.html
>
>The New York Times
>
>Editorial
>
>June 19, 2000
>
>Death Penalty Troubles in Texas
>
>The case of Gary Graham, a convicted killer scheduled for
>execution by lethal injection in Texas on Thursday, is a
>troubling saga of the nation's justice system gone badly
>awry. Now, two decades after the shooting for which Mr.
>Graham was condemned, this case poses a test of moral
>leadership for Gov. George W. Bush. It should challenge his
>unwavering faith in his state's administration of the death
>penalty, which has produced a rate of execution that is by
>far the highest in the country.
>
>These basic facts are indisputable. Mr. Graham, who was just
>17 at the time of the shooting, was convicted based solely
>on the testimony of a single eyewitness, Bernadine Skillern,
>who saw the assailant's face only fleetingly at night
>through her car windshield, from a distance of 30 to 40
>feet. Mr. Graham was represented by a famously lackadaisical
>defense attorney named Ronald Mock. Mr. Mock put on
>virtually no defense. He failed to alert the jury to the
>flawed police lineup that may have biased Ms. Skillern's
>recollection, or to the ballistics evidence showing that
>the gun found on Mr. Graham when he was arrested was not
>the gun used in the crime. Nor did Mr. Mock present two
>other witnesses who say they saw the assailant, and that
>it was not Mr. Graham.
>
>This is a shocking example of how inadequate legal
>representation sends poor people to death row, where
>some are no doubt wrongly executed. Shoddy lawyering also
>contributes to the extremely high reversal rate in capital
>cases documented in a new study of death penalty appeals by
>Prof. James Liebman of Columbia Law School. In Texas, as an
>investigation by The Chicago Tribune showed last week, inept
>legal defense work is a particularly acute problem.
>
>Earlier this month, in a nod to the new politics of the
>death penalty, Mr. Bush postponed the execution of an inmate
>named Ricky Nolen McGinn to allow DNA testing that could
>bear on his guilt or innocence. In the Graham case, there
>is no biological evidence to test, but the argument for
>a reprieve is at least as strong. Thanks to poor legal
>representation, and the impact of new state and federal
>laws designed to speed executions by truncating the
>appeals process, Mr. Graham has never gotten a fair
>hearing.
>
>It may be argued that Mr. Bush has no power to grant a
>reprieve, or postponement of the execution, since Texas
>law permits only one gubernatorial reprieve, and Mr. Graham
>received one from Gov. Ann Richards in 1993. However, it is
>not clear that the law precludes a second reprieve from a
>different governor. In any event, nothing prevents Mr. Bush
>from exercising leadership by urging the state's board of
>pardons to slow things down and conduct the careful review
>of the evidence that the courts failed to provide.
>
>Copyright (c) 2000 The New York Times Company.
>
>
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Yoshie